WHEN DID SNEAKERS BECOME ACCEPTABLE BUSINESS ATTIRE?

I haven’t done the rounds of many exhibitions the last few years. My focus area of office print is generally served by Vendor specific events and the one global event the industry had, CeBIT has now finally been put to bed. So I was quite surprised at my first visit to ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) 2019 in Amsterdam. It was full, thriving and so many people were wearing sneakers.

Does this have something to do with the meeting of two worlds that ISE has emerged from?  The vibrant Audio Visual (AV) high tech hardware focussed industry and the IT world that can integrate practically anything without having to heed to standards or obligations?

Founded in 2004 and boosting 3500 visitors that year, the exhibition has grown to some 1400 exhibitors and an expected 90,000 visitors in 2019. For me, it felt far more than that. The growth has undoubtedly been supported by the portfolio breadth of AV boasting 8k, curved as well as inflatable screens and flashy displays and its acceptance across many horizontal and vertical sectors. What attracted me most to the show however, was the connection to IT and looking at how the AV industry hooks up with business IT, the hub of our digital world today. I see a lot of parallels to the office printing industry and I knew this industry was in a similar stage of disruption when I saw the likes of Google & Uber speaking about workplace trends at ISE 2019. Read more »

Digital CMYK+ Ushers in a New Crop of Design Enthusiasts

Designing for offset print is nothing new; the PDF revolution is a distant memory at this point and the “how to design for print” guides are long gone. For quite some time, designers have understood how to extend gamut and design for that hit of varnish. With that said, designing for these offset jobs was always difficult and somewhat restrictive to the creative process. Any creative liberties typically added a significant amount of time to the process because prepress often needed to make corrections to the designers file for reliable printing. As a result, commercial printers have always had a love/hate relationship with the creative members of the design community. This all began to change when the HP Indigo Digital Presses began to roll out 7-color liquid toner capabilities. It was still important to educate the design community, but not in terms of capability—the focus shifted to learning how best to design a clean file for prepress.

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Fuji Xerox: Carving a Path for Production Inkjet

On January 22, Fuji Xerox announced its entry into the Digital High-Speed Roll-Fed Inkjet arena with the 11000 Inkjet Press. This device, which is targeted toward commercial printers, will be released to the Japanese market in February. The Fuji Xerox 11000 Inkjet Press will address the ongoing challenges that print provides face with inkjet production devices, namely the ability to run at high speeds on media that is typically used for applications like direct mail, marketing collateral, and catalogs. The new device is reportedly capable of producing up to 1,448 A4 pages per minute at near-offset quality.

FUJI XEROX 11000 Inkjet Press

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Highlights from Heimtextil 2019

From January 8 to 11, vendors and buyers working in the digital textile space headed to Heimtextil, the International Trade Fair for Home and Contract Textiles. The event provided an intimate section of digital textile printer companies exhibiting next to textile designers for the first time down in Hall 3.0. While it must be noted that attendance from the digital textile vendors was down this year, Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends (InfoTrends) attributes this decline largely to ITMA 2019: the quadrennial textile event taking place in June. While ITMA’s presence may have reduced digital textile machine exhibitor numbers, there were still some noteworthy products on display.

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China’s Suzhou Ruifa Looks to Disrupt the Printhead Manufacturing Segment

For decades, precise deposition of materials was achieved by utilizing a range of technologies that  produce range of products from graphics arts, decorative, functional, and a host of other applications. Today, several key inkjet technologies drive markets and applications. These are enabled in part by a new generation of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) deposition / jetting devices, whether continuous inkjet (CIJ), piezoelectric drop on demand, or thermal inkjet drop on demand (TIJ). These technologies have been – for most part – the domain of a handful of companies that had the intellectual property and made the investment in silicone-based printhead manufacturing for several quite some time.

While the main suppliers of existing inkjet heads are almost all clustered in Japan, Western Europe, and the USA, a new competitor is now launching in China. After a significant investment in technology and resources, China’s Suzhou Ruifa Printing Technology Co. has announced its entrance as a supplier of thermal inkjet printheads. The company’s new printhead, SUREJet T7680, is a 41mm/1.6” wide thermal head, with 7680 nozzles. According to Suzhou Ruifa, SUREJet T7680 has two meter per second print speed and is capable of 1800×1200 DPI print resolution.

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Highlights from JAPANTEX 2018

JAPANTEX 2018 was held over three days, November 20 – 22, at the Tokyo Big Sight International Exhibition Center. The event, which is currently in its 37^th year, serves as an annual exhibition of interior fabrics. Around 8,700 visitors, as well as exhibitors from 277 companies, attended the event, which this year focused on a combination theme of Japanese style and interior beauty, mixed with all the professionalism one can expect at this type of event.

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EFI Reggiani Pushes Single Pass Boundaries with New BOLT Hybrid Printer

Last week represented a significant milestone in EFI Reggiani’s history of providing printing solutions for the textile industry. The company announced its EFI Reggiani BOLT, a digital single pass production textile printer. To celebrate this event and highlight BOLT’s capabilities, the company invited almost 300 people to witness the unveiling – including customers, media, and its channel representatives from around the world – in its factory in Bergamo, Italy.

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Kofax to Acquire Nuance’s Document Imaging Business

On November 12, Kofax announced its intention to acquire the Nuance Document Imaging (NDI) division of Nuance Communications. If the deal closes as expected in Q1 of 2019, the move will catapult Kofax—already the 800-pound gorilla in the document capture market—to the leadership position in print-management and cost-recovery solutions, too. NDI itself is a product of Nuance’s once-acquisitive nature.

Source: http://www.picpedia.org/highway-signs/a/acquisition.html

The division’s portfolio of document solutions includes a host of product families purchased over the past decade or so, such as Equitrac (purchased in 2011), Output Manager (which came with the NSi acquisition in 2014), and Safecom (bought in 2012) for print management; Equitrac Professional and Copitrak (added in 2012) for cost recovery; AutoStore (another NSi product) and eCopy (acquired in 2009) for document capture and workflow; Business Connect for mobile document imaging; and OmniPage, PaperPort, and Power PDF for PDF and document conversion (these products, or the seeds for them, came from the original merger between Nuance and ScanSoft in 2005). Read more »

MTEX Solutions: A Key Iberian Manufacturer, Sprouting New Industrial Printers

MTEX Solutions, the Portuguese manufacturer of digital printers for textile and label applications, recently held its debut summit for customers and prospects in Porto, Portugal’s beautiful port city. Sporting the tagline “Back, Better than Ever,” the summit drew participants from as far away as Russia and the U.S. These attendees came to learn about a key industrial inkjet printer vendor, one lately transformed and growing internationally, and its new products. Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends (InfoTrends) attended the event and offers here what it captured about the company and its newest hardware.

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Nintendo Labo Shows Potential for New Sustainable Corrugated Cardboard Applications

Consumer electronics specialist Nintendo has been enjoying positive growth. Its newest video game console, the Nintendo Switch, is proving quite popular among consumers who are seeking an innovative gaming experience at home and on the go. With its numbers back in the green, the Japanese video game manufacturer has returned to doing what it does best—taking creative risks. One of its most recent products, Nintendo Labo, exemplifies the company’s desire to push the envelope.

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